Over the past several decades, there has been a wide increase in the retail sale of processed chicken, particularly in the form of prepackaged specific parts of chickens such as wings, breast portions, and legs. In addition to the growth in the retail market for such prepackaged parts, there has been a similar increased growth in the demand for specialized parts such as drumsticks, deboned breast portions, and various other special cuts.
As would normally be expected, processing chicken into such a variety of parts, particularly considering the large numbers of chickens presently processed commercially worldwide, requires either increased labor or some sort of mechanical assistance to produce the desired parts in the desired form in the numbers required. Where labor is expensive or simply unavailable, appropriate machinery for producing the chicken parts is a necessity.
One such chicken part which has recently come into marketplace demand is a small bone portion taken from the mid-joint portion of a chicken wing and which, because of its resemblance to a beef or pork spare rib, is referred to as a "chicken rib." As known to those familiar with poultry, a chicken wing comprises three basic portions. These are the drumette (also referred to as the "baby drum"), the mid-joint (sometimes also referred to as the "flat"), and the tip. If the human arm were used as a rough analogy, the drumette would correspond to the upper arm, the mid-joint to the forearm, and the tip to the hand. In a matter similarly analogous to the human forearm, the mid-joint portion of a chicken wing is formed of two longitudinally extending parallel bones. When the mid-joint is separated from the tip and the drumette and then split properly between the two generally parallel bones, the resulting product is the "chicken rib". The chicken rib product has a convenient size, shape and appearance and has quickly found wide acceptance, for example as an hors d'oeuvre type food, because of these characteristics. This acceptance has been demonstrated by the thirty cent per pound premium that chicken ribs presently carry over unsplit mid-joints.
Because the market demand for chicken ribs is relatively recent, production has to date proceeded by hand usually by shoving the mid-joint portion over some sort of knife to separate the two parallel bones. Needless to say, the process is labor intensive, expensive, time consuming, and potentially dangerous to the individuals carrying it out.
Additionally, in order to produce the chicken ribs in the fashion desired by the marketplace the mid-joint portions must be split in a manner which avoids cutting the bones and which maintains the meat portions intact on the bone. Bones which have been cut or from which the meat has been removed lower the quality and demand for the product. Thus, some of the automated poultry processing machinery that efficiently slices or otherwise partitions poultry is unacceptable for producing the chicken ribs, even assuming they could be adjusted to attempt the proper line of cut.
To date, no automated or semiautomated machinery or techniques exist for producing chicken ribs and thus they continue to be required to be manufactured by the disadvantageous hand method.